The Icemark 100
by Boomerang Fish
Summary: The Challenge: Write 100 Icemark oneshots based on 100 semi-random prompts. Go forth! Here are mine. - 95: Patience
1. THE LIST

**The Challenge: 100 Icemark oneshots based on the following semi-random prompts. They can be any pairing, time, universe, or flavor, as long as they have to do with Icemark. I'll post mine shortly in this same story. **

**Happy writing!**

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**The List**

1. Introduction

2. Love

3. Calling

4. Irregular Orbit

5. Response

6. Permanent

7. Flaw

8. Huge Intelligence

9. Everyday Magic

10. Shelter

11. Worst

12. Sun and Moon

13. Making History

14. Practice

15. Enemy

16. Perfect

17. Keeping A Secret

18. Reward

19. _Pavor Nocturnus _

20. Questioning

21. Execution

22. Regret

23. Irritation

24. Forlorn Memory

25. Everyday Ridiculousness

26. Dying

27. Personality

28. Librarian

29. Inconvenience

30. Invalid

31. Officer

32. Exam

33. Special

34. Phenomena

35. Bond

36. Encrypted

37. Pen and Paper

38. Epic Fail

39. A Moment in Time

40. Knife

41. Game

42. Address

43. Success

44. 67%

45. Power

46. Pattern

47. Slaughterhouse

48. Father

49. Mother

50. Son

51. Daughter

52. Change in the Weather

53. Hangover

54. Coat

55. Whole

56. Safety First

57. Invasion

58. Alternate Universe

59. Recollection

60. Textbook

61. Nonsense

62. Lies

63. Surname

64. No Way Out

65. Mispronunciations

66. Running Away

67. Negotiation

68. Shades of Gray

69. Unsettling Revelations

70. Hypocrite

71. Fork in the Road

72. Snow

73. Only Human

74. Difficulty

75. Ally

76. Plan

77. Praise

78. Can You Hear Me?

79. Politician

80. Honoring

81. Wind

82. River

83. Mischief Managed

84. No Way Out

85. Heritage

86. Slogan

87. Danger Ahead

88. Seeking Solace

89. Insanity

90. Smile

91. Never Again

92. Burning

93. Patience

94. Dead Wrong

95. Lovely

96. Weakness

97. Advantage

98. Puzzle

99. Truth

100. Finished


	2. 9: Everyday Magic

**A short note on ratings before we start: the vast majority of these will be K, K+ or T. However, I make no guarantees that there won't be one or two that deserve an M rating (even if just for safety). It won't be for explicit sexy stuff (**_**I'm very awkward**_**) but general darkness, disturbing themes or violence is fair game. I'm not changing the rating for the whole story, because then it wouldn't show up in the category, no new folks could see the list and that would be saddening. Any chapter that has M stuff or that I think deserves it ****will have a warning at the top**.

**This first one is not one of those.**

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**9: Everyday Magic**

His powers grow every day. In the past week alone he turned the ceiling of their room into the night sky over the Ice Wastes, sprinkling it with tiny stars and setting the Veils of the Blessed Moon to cascade and glow. He mends holes in his clothing and hers by passing a hand over the tears. He called life back into dead wood, branches and roots twining forth from a dry bit of kindling, and now a new tree grows in the Citadel's garden.

She realizes that he does these things to impress her, but greater than any feat of magic he could perform is his simple presence. Oskan, who gave her bread for Yule and can always make her laugh, even when the stresses of rule rattle in her head like trapped birds. Oskan, who stood by her during the darkest time, who gave up his life for her, who came back. Who knows her better than she knows herself.

With him, every day is magical.


	3. 21: Execution

**Wrote this while reading _The Sound and the Fury _for school. It shows.**

**Young Octavius! Also, Scipio Bellorum is a f***ing terrible parent. **

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**21: Execution**

It's late. Father where are we going? Not a classroom. Too much stone we're underground don't know.

Is this a test? Like a practical? Has to be.

Combat knife serrated near the handle for sawing and a blood groove it's sharp heavy in my hands not mine so why?

No nonono not the door what let me out!

What am I supposed to do here?

Bundle in the corner, pale and dirty and it's breathing scared and eyes like saucers big.

What are you what did you do why are you here?

I was woken. Just me. And the knife door closed man in corner the knife oh that's why.

And -

-this is -

- a test.

Back up back up backupgetout this is a practical you and man fight get out of the room outoftheroom but don't let him see your fear they smell fear people see fear and then you're done you're dead no CALM DOWN NOW and think CALM three point one four one five nine two. six five three five think your way out – calm - you've got a knife and the man hasn't moved to attack is he armed he doesn't look it. Looks sick actually. Scared. Saucer eyes flicking from face to knife to face and he's sweating. No threat. He's chained. That's why he's so hunched down small.

And this is a test.

And the knife.

Test.

The final.

And this is my test and his execution.

I shouldn't delay this is a test.

Every second delayed means lost points.

Father will be angry.

I'll fail. Step forward now.

Why is he here?

I will fail.

I don't know who you are.

I can't kill him if I don't know what he did he could just be a beggar or petty criminal or something not deserving death can't kill if I'm not sure and I can't be sure because there's no one to ask.

But I'll fail, I can't fail I can't. Artery. No. Just do it fast. But he's hiding his heart; he's all hunched over.

I'm sorry. I don't want to. I'm sorry. Carotid artery and his neck a bright smile blood and twitching man and he's limp red on the floor on the knife on me and it smells like metal the human body has ten pints of blood venous bleeding flows arterial spurts the arteries carry blood from the heart to the limbs ten pints of blood I'm sorry.

Just open the door now. I'm done. I'm DONE. Test over.

And I have the knife and before he can do anything I'm in close stabbing neck heart lungs stomach kidney and blood blood everywhere spurts red and it's on me ten pints and on the floor and he's falling over but I keep on with the knife heart shoulder lungs I hate you I hate you I hate you but no I don't I can't. Tense and prickling skin crawling spine I want to shrink down all small I hate you I hate you I hate you.

How am I feeling? Fine, sir.


	4. 13: Making History

**13: Making History**

It's said the Imperial Military Academy's written entrance exam is hell on paper. Rather than test rote memorization, the exam looks for an applicant's mental weaknesses (in the eyes of the army, of course – mercy is one) and measures reasoning abilities and innate tactical skill through puzzles and scenario essays. Of course boys try to study – expensive tutors are hired and months spent poring over tactics manuals and practice examinations. As the Academy never releases test questions, it is questionable how well practice tests written by third parties actually prepare a taker for the real thing, but anything and everything is on the table when one's future hinges on five hours at a desk.

No applicant has ever scored above 4990. It's commonly thought to be impossible to get the last ten points, and close-to-perfect is as perfect as is reasonably expected.

_Bellorum, Scipio. __Score: 5000_

-ACCEPT-

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**DAMN IT COLLEGE BOARD YOU'VE DOOMED US ALL**


	5. 93: Never Again

**93: Never Again**

_She seemed like such a good wife._

_How could it happen?_

_And with the children upstairs, too._

_How could we not know?_

That is what they will say. She does not care. She would rather be a good mother than a good wife.

She can still remember the feel of the knife. Not meant for killing, but sharp enough. How it all happened so fast. How she didn't think, only _no, not again,_ and a tumble and crashing of red.

It took him a while. She watched his eyes until the end. Disbelief. Confusion. Whether it was inability to comprehend his death or her violence she did not know.

And then she walked to the door and sent for the Watch.

They are safe. It was not premeditated; she wishes it had not had to come to this. But she does not regret it. They are safe. She is safe, her babies are safe, he cannot hurt any of them. Not ever again.

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**Bellorum's wife POV. She kills her abusive husband and now she's waiting for the police to get there.** **My mind is a dark abyss. **


	6. 26: Dying

**26: Dying**

Octavius had never given much thought to how he would die. If he had, _while trying to save another_ would not have topped the list.

He doesn't have time to register the strangeness and irony of it. From the moment he sees the gun, he only has time to jump.

It's not a bad way to go, if unexpected.

She screams.

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**Connected to Clopin's CxO 100, which you should read (specifically the "Death to All Happiness" series). She ships Cressida x Octavius, I ship Characters x Trauma. I ship it like FedEx. **


	7. 22: Regret

**22: Regret**

"_Why_ would you do that?" the nurse looks at Octavius like he's an idiot as he sucks down as much milk as possible.

You couldn't back down a dare. Or you could, but he wouldn't. So when Sulla challenged him to sneak into the glass gardens and eat one of the hot peppers they bred to put in gas canisters, he did. And ran to the infirmary as soon as he could breathe, trembling and sick and feeling like his insides were on fire.

He's never listening to Sulla again.

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**Child Octavius and Child Sulla get into shenanigans. FINALLY, a drabble where nobody dies! **


	8. 64: Lies

**64: Lies**

The house smelled like illness. Not that illness had a particular smell, but there were scents he always associated with the sickroom. Medicine, antiseptic, and now the copper tang of blood. It had that stillness too, that close and airless feel, where the only activity is the doctors and nurses going about their business and everyone else is waiting for something. Anything.

"Damn it, I can't do this a second time. Identify the body, of course, but we're just waiting around, not even fighting anyone. That's all done. It's just sickness," His brother had been doing this more and more often, walking around the house and garden and rambling. It grated on his nerves. "I thought it was a _cough_. I - "

"Will you _stop_."

Octavius wasn't at all concerned over his father's recent decline in health. He hadn't even been surprised, though he had acted the part quite well. He thought of the six glass vials in their case, sunk to the bottom of the river. When it really came down to it, the decision had been easy enough. The trouble had been getting the proportions just right. He hadn't known the specific poisons used or in what quantities, only the symptoms that they produced. Mother's sickness had been gradual, subtle, and he thought in terms of poetic justice he should replicate that as closely as possible. He had tested various cocktails on stray cats, and this one had come closest to what he remembered. Still, it was not perfect. It was more aggressive; it made its presence known, the victim did not simply waste away with chest pains and breathing trouble but went out in great bloody coughs.

He didn't worry about detection. The doctors had tested blood, of course, but by that time the toxins had left the bloodstream and accumulated in the tissues. This was the ingeniousness of such poisons, killing after months, mimicking the natural procession of an illness. In a detached, scientific manner, Octavius was quite pleased with himself.

"I can't imagine how you're taking this in such stride."

"I'm _not_, but babbling about it won't do a thing. Besides, what would Father say if he knew you were acting like this?" He carefully controlled every muscle on his face, every twitch, flick of his eyes, every breath. Octavius composed his face into a perfect lie, just like his father had taught him.

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**HEY LOOK MORE DEATH, CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP. And that's three drabbles involving Bellorum being killed by a member of his family (I count Child Octavius thinking of it).**

**This also says that Scipio killed his wife, which is my headcanon. That is my dark-as-heck story and I'm sticking to it. **


	9. 62: Textbook

**62: Textbook**

"…_It is accepted that the world is governed by certain laws of nature; therefore, nothing that exists can be _unnatural_…. Rather, magic can be thought of as a force much like gravity…" _– Dr. Cordelia Lindenshield, 1159

"…The fifth and most complex of the five fundamental interactions is the thaumatic force, because it is an interaction not only between force particles and matter but also between two types of force particles. It is also the only force directly connected to and controllable by the human brain in the process known as thaumatic affinity, the basic physics of which will be covered in more detail later in this book. The carrier particle of the thaumatic force is the thaumaton, of mass 0...

…The most basic thaumatic interactions are with gravitons and photons. Thaumatic interaction with gluons and weak gauge bosons, while possible, is rarely attempted because of the danger associated with changing atomic structure. Different from the levitation produced by thaumatic-gravitational interaction, thaumatic influence on Hirtian bosons diminishes an object's mass, permitting transfiguration free of conservation of mass laws."

(From _Introduction to Elementary Particle Physics _by Jonasson and Tullius, pub.1882)

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**Yes, fantasy world particle physics. **

**In reality there are only fundamental interactions. I figured that with magic to help in the detection, Higgs bosons and gravitons could be confirmed earlier. The publication year of the textbook: I figured they'd be accelerated by a couple hundred years because the whole already having airships indicates more advanced technology sooner. Yup, Polypontian and Icemark co-authors. And a Lindenshield descendent with a Polypontian first name as a physicist, shippers take that how you will. **


	10. 33: Special

**33: Special**

The first thing Octavius learned was that he had a gift, but it was also a condition.

The second was that ordinary people would not understand.

But he was better than them, so it didn't matter.

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**I'm fresh out of A/N jokes. It's an off day. **


	11. 95: Patience

**95: Patience**

Dr. Lucius Tertullian waits for his patient to wake up. He watches as the nurses change the young man's bandages, give him hydration and painkillers and blood volume expanders through the tube in his arm, check his wounds for infection. If circumstances weren't quite so dire, Dr. Tertullian would already be drafting his journal article on the young man's case. A medical miracle. That tube, a whole new procedure. He'd be published for sure. But circumstances are dire, Dr. Tertullian isn't the only man waiting, and he's not sure how much longer he can tell the man from Romula that his lordship must be allowed to rest.

The doctor and the man from Romula are present when the patient stirs. The doctor takes a small mirror and reflects light into the patient's good eye, and his pupil contracts. He taps the patient's elbows and knees, feeling for reflexive twitches. Next he asks the patient to move his hands, flex his feet, both sides if you please. The patient complies on his right side, but his left hand and left foot barely flutter. Interesting. It must have come from the brain injury, but the trauma was to the _right_ side of his head. Modern medicine could learn so much from this case, if only the man from Romula wouldn't rush things along.

Now for the part that the man from Romula is there for. Dr. Tertullian raises three fingers and asks the patient to please count them. There is a gleam of intelligence in the young man's eye before he passes out.

/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/

"We cannot wait, Doctor," says the man from Romula.

"And I cannot go any faster, Colonel. Have you any idea what kind of injuries we're dealing with here? I'm _inventing _protocol as I go, count your blessings that his lordship is even breathing," Dr. Tertullian snaps. The man from Romula has only seen the patient stable. The doctor has been elbow deep in his blood and touched his brain on that chaotic night the sky-ships came in. He can still see it. Late and the wards mostly empty, the lookouts sounding the alarm; ships coming from the north, wounded aboard. They rushed to the airfield in time to see the first come down, an ungraceful landing; the captain venting hydrogen-helium until he hovered barely a foot above the dirt, soldiers and medics leaping from the hatches to help unload. His patient was the first off, of course.

He had written the young man off as a lost cause. Stab wound to the abdomen, massive injury to the head. Right eye gone, right side of his jaw ruined, skull broken open, brain showing under all the blood when the doctor unwound the bandages. Surely a hopeless case, move on. But no. Between the ships and the hospital, they had enough personnel to handle the wounded. He would try, even though some would say this patient didn't deserve to be saved. It wasn't a doctor's place to decide who lived and died, Dr. Tertullian had thought, only help as best he could and let nature take its course.

The surgery had taken fully half a day. They had administered painkillers; it could not have been enough for what they were doing, but the patient would hardly notice any more pain - if he had brain function left at all. At every turn Dr. Tertullian thought he would fail, there was no other possible outcome, but the man pulled through. Simply remarkable.

And now this man from Romula wanted to rush the next most critical part. Who knew who the patient would be when he woke up?Dr. Tertullian had read other accounts of massive brain trauma - the Pawan miner with a steel rod in the front of his skull, the girl in Kara Kitai who took an arrow straight through her head. Both survived against all odds, but both were deeply different afterward. And what skills? Clearly the patient had lost muscle control on his left side. Could he think critically? Could he even speak?

What would someone like the patient, whose entire life had been built on physical and mental skill, do when he woke up and all of it was gone?

"I understand the severity of his lordship's injuries -"

"Then you should also know that the recovery will take months. Years, for the brain."

"-but the fact remains that the Empire is under attack _now, _and we need his tactical expertise more than ever."

"You realize that little or none of that tactical expertise may remain? At the moment my fingers are crossed for gross motor, maybe speech. Fighting a war, even if he's doing it from a desk, _may_ be asking a bit much."

The man from Romula appears to hesitate, as if wondering how to phrase his next argument. "Doctor. I realize that you may think this course of action medically foolish -", he raises his hand to forestall any comments, " - but the situation in the south is much worse than the newspapers have reported. My superiors are of the opinion that _any_ assistance his lordship could provide would be beneficial."

They are desperate, Tertullian realizes with sinking fear. He glances through the window to where his patient lies, unconscious yet again, constantly monitored by a rotation of nurses. Heavy painkillers and sedatives keep him almost comatose, and a modified neck brace immobilizes his head and jaw. Bandages cover half his face and all of his scalp and wrap around his abdomen. The great and terrifying Commander Sulla Bellorum, hovering between life and death in an intensive care ward.

The doctor is a kind man, and cannot help but pity his patient. No retirement for him, if by chance he survives, no pension, no slow recovery in the countryside. Of course not. An intelligence such as his is far too valuable. A resource, a sort of adding machine, albeit one that had to be paid. _Poor man, they want a weapon, and you're not yet done._

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__**Scipio viewed his sons as resources foremost, I don't see that changing after his death, and the Empire's in a really dire position after BOF. So it's back to work - kind of a shit deal for Sulla, though. **

**I _like_ this. I'm going to continue with it. **


End file.
